Direct Beam Comms #62

TV

Legion – Episode 1 Grade: A

We may have entered a second phase of superhero movies/TV series with the debut of the FX series Legion last week. Most superhero movies/TV series have always focused on the good guys vs the bad guys. Captain America against Hydra, Flash against Gorilla Grodd, Batman vs Joker. But Legion, along with the likes of last year’s Deadpool, does something different with the genre. It takes what has come before, turns it around, mixes things up and presents the story as something new and unique.

In Legion, David Haller (Dan Stevens) is in a mental institution as he has begun to lose his grip on sanity, hearing voices which drove him to attempt suicide. In the asylum, he meets Sydney Barrett (Rachel Keller), another patient who shows David that he might not be as crazy as he thinks he is. That these voices and his apparent ability to make things move with his mind might be something more. The word “mutant” is never uttered in Legion, but if you’ve read the X-Men comics or seen the movies you’ll know where this one is coming from.

David escapes the asylum but is kidnapped and taken by a shady government organization headed by some seriously creepy dudes who question him about his abilities, and give off the definite vibe that if they don’t like David’s answers they’ll kill him. But can David trust this reality? Is he really on the outside doing battle with these evil forces, or is everything that’s happening to him all happening in his head back at the asylum?

Created by Noah Hawley (Fargo), Legion feels like it’s a series where the creators have taken in decades worth of comics and movies and have distilled all this with other elements from pop-culture like a Wes Anderson/Stanley Kubrick aesthetic mixed with the tone and nonlinear storytelling techniques used in things like the TV series Hannibal. The first episode of Legion starts during the present and flashes to different points in David’s past. From when he was an infant, to an out of control teen and to his time in the asylum. And all these timelines play out during the episode which works brilliantly. I don’t think anyone would mistake Legion for another superhero series like Arrow or Agents of SHIELD since Legion doesn’t look or feel like any superhero thing that’s come before.

Which makes me really excited for Legion and the future of superhero movies/TV series in general. I’m a fan of anything superhero and have been most of my life. I’m going to love just about any superhero movie or TV series, or at worst give them a pass. But it makes me wonder how many movies like Batman vs Superman that people who don’t give anything superhero a pass are going to take before they stop going to them? What gives me hope is if superhero movies/TV series can evolve and change like Deadpool and Legion did/are, and hopefully the upcoming Logan movie might be, maybe I don’t have to worry about a coming superhero movie collapse and me with nothing to watch?

24 Legacy – Episode 1 Grade: B-

TV show revivals are popular these days. Last year FOX brought back The X-Files and later this year will premiere new episodes of Prison Break. But their latest revival series 24: Legacy is kind’a a spin-off, kind’a a remake and kind’a a continuation if the original 24.

24 Legacy follows the structure of the original series with each episode taking place in “real time” with the hero, this time ex-Army Ranger Eric Carter (Corey Hawkins) in the lead, racing around trying to stop terrorists before they can launch some attack. I swear I tried watching each new season of the original 24 with an open mind, but the longest I ever lasted was about six episodes in the first season. I could never get past the idea that events in the show are taking place in “real time” which meant people would be able to drive through city traffic that should take hours instead of minutes while at the same time having running machine gun battles all around town with seemingly no one noticing. I even remember one season where a terrorists set off a nuke in LA. Now if that happened today I’d suspect everyone in town would be hitting the roads heading for the hills, yet that kind of stuff never seemed to happen in 24.

And unfortunately 24: Legacy seems to essentially be the same 24 with subtle variations.

This time, terrorists are tracking down six members of an Army Ranger squad who killed one of their leaders in a Osama bin Laden Zero Dark Thirty style raid. The bad guys aren’t looking for revenge, but are looking for a lock box that contains a something that I’m sure this will be revealed in later episodes. Regardless, while four of the Rangers and their families are murdered by the terrorists, they didn’t count on Carter and Carter’s wife who together take out a terrorist team who breaks into their house looking for the box. And since the only people who knew Carter’s and the other Ranger’s identities were the leaders of the CIA, FBI and CTU, the only person Carter can really trust is ex-CTU head Rebecca Ingram (Miranda Otto) who thought she was out, but was pulled back.

24: Legacy is entertaining if a bit vapid. The stories for over 200 episodes of 24 never seemed to vary too much; terrorists want to blow something up and it’s up to one dude to stop them, which all becomes very repetitive. And by the looks of it 24: Legacy seems to be following the same mold.

Stranger Things season 2 TV spot

The Americans season 5 TV spot

Iron Fist first season TV spot

Comics

Out this week is He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Newspaper Comic Strips that collects all four years of something I never knew existed.

For over four years, Masters of the Universe had its own newspaper comic strip! This story continued the tales from the Filmation cartoon and bridged the saga to the space-themed New Adventures of He-Man cartoon relaunch. The comic strip only ran in selected newspapers and was never reprinted, so most fans have never read it … until now!

Titan Comics begins reprinting the long out of print and now very expensive The Forever War comic series written by Joe Haldeman and illustrated by Marvano. Forever War is my all-time favorite book so I bought the first comic collection when it was out decades ago the last time the series was published but am seriously excited about this new comics series.

An epic SF war story spanning space and time, The Forever War explores one soldier’s experience caught up in the brutal machinery of a war that reaches across the stars.

PrometheusCharlie Holloway: What we hoped to achieve was to meet our makers, to get answers why they made us in the first place.David: Why do you think your people made me?Charlie Holloway: We made ya 'cause we could.David: Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?